The deer racing across a field
of the same clay and tallow
color they are — if they are:
or are they tricks of the light? —
must feel themselves being poured
and pouring through life. We’ re not built
but become: trembling columns
of apprehension that ripple
and pass those ripples to and fro
with the world that shakes around us —
it too is something poured
and ceaselessly pouring itself.
February shakes the fields
and trembles in each yellow willow.
•
The violin’ s back is not veneer —
the strummed wood shudders together.
Undivided by caution
each note is its own first thought.
My first thought’ s a kind of prayer
that I might resonate entire —
sometimes it’ s such a meager portion
shaking a little, as if it ought...
Every day, the same desire
to push myself through the door
that leads to some bright place,
brighter than the concert platform,
where the whole self echoes together —
the outer to the inner pleasure.
•
Everything runs together —
the light smells of spring,
the unreasonable brightness
of this peg, this sheet, this line tethering
linen between sky and mud
as if the garden marked a pause
in that eternal return
whose looping trace is the blood
hissing through the ventricles.
What gives you life’ s the thing that kills.
Until you spill the lip
trembling on its bright liquid
all you need’ s this play of surface —
all that you need. All you have.